Wings of Omen

"So, what do you see. Did the Stormgod hear me? Does Vashanka favor me? Can I bind Him to me? Sell me a potion to bind the Stormgod!"

She meant to send him away. The S'danzo had no use for gods and were happiest when the gods had nothing to do with the S'danzo. It didn't matter that she could answer his questions. He had focused her Sight on the god and she wanted him, and all that was in his memories, gone before ('(noticed her. Yet she could still hear the laughter and didn't that mean, answer him or not, that the damage was already done?

The youth mistook her hesitation for imminent betrayal. "Don't give me suvesh talk." He reached across the table to grip her wrist.

"See the priests if you want to talk to the Stormgod," she replied icily, extracting herself with a swift, small movement he had never seen, or felt, before. But for the blacksmith, whose hammer rang in the sunlight beyond her shop, she'd have been a sewer-snipe herself. She knew his type of brazen pride and knew, as he did himself, that any whim of fate could squash him, without warning. He had stumbled into something vaster and more dangerous than he had ever imagined. As much as he lusted after the excitement and glory, he feared it.

"What do the priests know?" he said, as if any priest would have spoken to him. "Nosing up to the snakes. They don't know anything about Vashanka."

"If you know so much more than the priests, you certainly know more than a S'danzo fortune-teller." She pushed the gold coin back to him.

"A half-S'danzo fortune-teller who knew when that damned fleet would arrive could talk to Vashanka if she dared." He ignored the coin and met her stare.

Anything that survived in the gutter of Sanctuary was dangerous. Zip had already violated her home with his visions; would he be any more dangerous with the truth about his prayers, sacrifices, and altar-or any the less?

"Keep your gold and everything else. Vashanka is no more."

He sat back as if she'd struck him. Surely he'd heard the rumors, lived through the storm that saw Vashanka's name struck from the pantheon archstones? Perhaps he hadn't quite believed that the Rankan Stormgod had been vanquished in the skies over Sanctuary, but he should have learned to contain his horror if he expected to survive.

"I give Him blood at my altar... and He takes it!"

"Fool! Leave the gods to the priests. You find a pile of rotting stones in the mud by the White Foal and you think you can lure Vashanka to your cause. Vashanka! The Storm-god of Ranke-and with the blood of a pig!"

"He hears me! I feel Him but I can't hear Him! He's telling me something and I can't hear him!"

"You don't want to know what hears you. Could Ranke have built a temple to Vashanka, lost it to the White Foal, and all Sanctuary forgotten it was there except for you?" She was standing, leaning over her table, screaming in his face and unmindful of everything except the laughter he'd left in her mind. She couldn't See what he had raised yet, but it was getting clearer the longer he sat there with his sacrifices and memories battering against her.

"Get out of here! Vashanka does not hear you. No god yet born hears you! Nothing hears you! May the dung rise up and swallow you before anything listens to you again!"

She did not believe the S'danzo had the power to curse, but the sewer-snipe did. Zip backed up until the sunlight from the doorway fell around his feet, then he turned and ran, not noticing, or perhaps not caring, that he had left his gold coin behind.

" 'Lyra! What happened?" Dubro called to her from the doorway. He took a step to follow the youth, then turned back and rushed to catch Illyra before she collapsed over her table. He carried her in his arms like a sick child, berating himself for not sensing the danger in the young man, while she whispered broken phrases in the ancient S'danzo language.

The rat-faced sewer-snipe had forced her to See what should not be Seen and what she should not dare to remember. Each breath and heartbeat solidified the images and knowledge. Illyra worked frantically to blind herself to what had happened, before it spread like poison through wine and condemned her as surely as it had condemned the young man. She bound the knowledge in the form of one of the great black carrion-birds that flocked above the Char-nel House and, with a wrenching sob, set it free.

"'Lyra, what's wrong?" her husband asked, stroking her hair and swabbing her tears with the comer of his sweaty tunic.

"I don't know," she answered honestly. A shimmering blackness of her own devising hung in her memories. The fear remained, and a sense of doom, but the vision itself had been seared away; the sound of a child crying was all that remained. "The children," she whispered.

Dubro left his forge in the care of his new, anxious apprentice and followed Illyra through the Bazaar to the Street of Red Lanterns. Children were an inevitable byproduct of life on the Street, and even if most of them wound up in the gutters, a few of them enjoyed a healthy, sheltered childhood within the Houses themselves. Myrtis, madam of the fortresslike Aphrodisia House, kept the boys as well as the girls, and had apprenticed one youth to Dubro in exchange for sheltering the couple's twin son and daughter.

The Street was quiet and drab in the afternoon sunlight. Illyra let go of Dubro's hand and told herself that there was no danger, that the blackness in her mind was a nightmare she could release and forget. She thought nothing of the young woman ru

"Shipri be praised, you're right here! He was sleeping with the rest-"

The woman's hysteria rekindled Illyra's anxiety and her Sight. She Saw the room where Myrtis, frowning, leaned over a cradle; where chubby blonde Lillis cowered in a shadowed comer; and where her year-and-a-half-old son had stopped crying. Following the certainty of her vision she raced ahead down stairways and corridors.

"You've come so quickly," the ageless madam said, looking up from the cradle, a momentary wrinkle of confusion on her brow. "Ah, but yes, you do have the Sight, don't you?" The confusion vanished. "You know as much as I, then." She made room for the child's mother at the cradle.

The little boy lay rigid in some sudden, paralyzing fever. His breath came in sporadic gasps, each holding the possibility that there would be no others. His tears were drying on his dirty cheeks. Illyra brushed her fingers across one rivulet and shivered when she saw that the darkness was in the tears themselves.

"It is like no disease I know of," Myrtis disclaimed. "I would send word to Lythande, but the Blue Star is beyond my call now. We can summon Stulwig or some other-"

"There's no need," Illyra said wearily.

She was seeing everything twice: once with her own eyes and mind, then a second time with the Sight. The strange-ness should have been overwhelming, but because the Sight itself was involved, there could be no surprises. Dubro pushed aside the curtain and joined them. She glanced at him and Saw the completeness of his being: his boyhood, his manhood, his death-and quickly lowered her eyes. Again she made a raven of Vision and set the knowledge free, but the new darkness it left within her was insignificant compared to the old.

Because she would only look at her shallow-breathing son whose shape and fate was the same in both visions, Illyra was left alone with him. She sat on the rocking stool and felt the square of window-light move across her shoulders, then the first chill of twilight. They brought her a thin broth, which she ignored, and wrapped a heavier shawl around herself as the night air thickened. She moved as little as Alton did in her arms.